July 2013

It’s often hard for me to believe the National Postal Museum has been around for 20 years now. On July 30, 1993 we opened our doors to the public and hundreds streamed in that day. Twenty years and millions of visitors later, dozens of exhibit have come and gone, but the core purpose of the museum remains. We share the remarkable story of the U.S. postal system with our visitors.

If the core purpose remains the same, how we tell that story has certainly changed. When we opened in 1993 we were using state of the art materials, including the best software available at the time for our computer interactives—DOS, and the best media of the day to hold our videos—laserdiscs. Today, not only are the software and media upgraded to meet 21st century demands, but I am sharing this story with visitors online—a concept I couldn’t imagine in 1993.

Anxious eyes watching as the centerpiece of the museum’s atrium, the 1919 deHavilland airmail plane is being hung.

Opening this museum seemed a Herculean task. A tiny staff, with enthusiastic support from dozens of others from across the Smithsonian, managed to pull off what seemed to many to be impossible, opening a Smithsonian museum in 33 months. Fortunately for me, I was too young and inexperienced at the time to be scared by the tight time frame. I was too busy being terrified by the realization that I would be curating the exhibits to an entire museum.

Getting ready to go into the building in the early days of construction. Left to right: Herb Collins, Director, National Philatelic Collection, Wendy Aibel-Weiss, Head of Education, NPM, unknown, unknown, Glen Hopkins, Construction Manager, James Bruns, Director, NPM, author, Shirley Vann, Administrative Officer, Ginny Kilby, National Philatelic Collections Manager.

We made our opening date, an accomplishment made possible only by the passion and devotion given to the project by every one of the many who worked on it. And though we opened on time, everyone was working feverishly up to that last day. As Ted Wilson, NPM’s Registrar remembered in a 2008 interview, “the day before it was like total chaos. We had cherry pickers in the atrium cleaning the airplanes. We had just swarms of people around and construction workers and everything and then there comes opening day and I forget how many people we had that opening day but the museum was completely filled and it was very exciting.” The museum’s loan officer, Patricia Raynor, also in a 2008 interview spoke of the strange and hectic days before opening, noting that she “spent most of that week cleaning exhibit cases and I couldn’t believe what I was doing, teaching curators from the American History museum who had come over to help, how to properly clean an exhibit case. I thought that was pretty funny. Senior and curatorial staff vacuuming and cleaning—something they’re usually not doing.”

Inside the building in the early days. Left to right: Glen Hopkins, Construction Manager, author, James Bruns, Director, NPM, Ted Wilson, Collections Manager, NPM, Wendy Aibel-Weiss, Head of Education, NPM.

Opening day was an exciting time. After all of those months of work, we finally had the opportunity to show it off. It was exciting, but also frightening. I had done an interview with a Washington Post reporter as part of the review she was doing on the museum. It would be in the paper on opening day. I remember waking up early in the morning and hearing the paper hit the hallway in front of my apartment door around 5:30 am. I suddenly realized I couldn’t move. I was literally frozen in the bed. I kept wanting to move but couldn’t. It was the strangest feeling. I was so scared of what that article might say that I couldn’t get out of bed.And I was that way for about a half an hour until finally, I just willed myself to get out of the bed and I went to the door and got the paper. A friend was staying on my couch at the time. I sat down and proceeded to read the entire out loud. And then when it was over, I looked at her and asked, “Was that good?” because I was not taking any of it in. She laughed and said, “that’s a grand slam.”

Opening day, Old City Post Office building. This space, just off of the historic lobby, is soon to be the home of the new William H. Gross Stamp Gallery.

The day that followed was wall to wall visitors and the exciting reality of knowing that all those months of work were worth as we watched people go through our exhibits, watch our videos, and play our games for the first time. I’ve opened a number of exhibits since, but none have matched that mixture of utter joy and complete exhaustion that I felt twenty years ago today. I’m excited to watch the museum expand onto another floor this fall, with the opening of the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery. I don’t know what the next twenty years will bring for the museum, but I do know that our staff and volunteers will continue to make this museum a remarkable experience for our visitors to enjoy.

July 1, 1963 saw the public introduction of a new way of processing our mail by adding five numbers to each address. These new Zoning Improvement Plan numbers, or ZIP Codes, were used to speed up mail processing. The Post Office Department was in dire need of all the help it could get in handling mail, the amount of which had doubled since the Second World War. Mail across the country was pouring into post offices faster than it could be processed and delivered.

ZIP Codes divided the nation into delivery areas based on numbers beginning in the northeast and moving west. The codes began with general areas and moved to specific post offices. Think of each 5-digit ZIP Code as a group of addresses. They might be homes or businesses, schools or apartment houses. One 5-digit number might represent 10,000 delivery points—spread out over many miles in a rural area or concentrated in a few city blocks. The first digit represents a region of the country. The next two digits stand for a central post office facility in the region. The last two digits represent a post office or zone.

Postal officials anticipated some resistance by the public to using ZIP codes. Not only did people have to remember a series of numbers assigned to their address, but also the numbers assigned to each of their correspondents. The Department began a nation-wide publicity campaign for the service, using posters, radio, and television advertisements, to enticing noted singer Ethel Merman to record a ZIP code song (sung to the tune of "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah"). (1)

Unfortunately for the Post Office Department, the 1960s were a turbulent time for Americans and numbers. It was in this decade that the full switch from alpha-numeric telephone numbers (Glenn Miller’s “PEnnsylvania 6-5000” was a shout out to the phone number for The Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City), to numbers only, with area codes added in to boot! As a result, there was more public resistance to using ZIP codes than might have been anticipated. As the editor of the Decator Herald put it, “The US postoffice department comes up with a new ZIP code before most of us know our telephone area code number.” An editor from the Los Angeles Times grumbled that the new ZIP code number was one more step towards turning people into numbers. “What with wage earners already neatly tagged with social security numbers and all-digit phones multiplying, the numbers wizards should have us pigeon-holed and responding to subliminal remote control in plenty of time to beat Orwell’s 1984 deadline.” (2)

Despite that unease, today most Americans can recite their ZIP code (as well as those of close friends and family). The later introduction of ZIP+4 was less successful with the public, but was a success for bulk mailings, allowing mail pieces to be sorted more swiftly and correctly through the US Postal Service’s massive mazes of automated equipment.

Once numbers (i.e., ZIP Codes) represented addresses, barcodes representing those numbers was the next step. Barcodes are easily read by machines all along the path of a letter or parcel. From the start, they helped mail reach its destination faster and more accurately. Today, they help generate information for senders and recipients as mail moves across the country. The USPS began using barcodes in 1982. The bars represented the five digits of the ZIP Code, and helped automate mail sorting—the machines read the stripes instead of the numbers. Over the years, the USPS has used 5, 6, 9, and now 11-digit barcodes to steadily increase the speed and accuracy of mail delivery. The extra bars include “carrier sort” level coding that sorts the mail to the order it’s delivered in. (3)

Of course, the most iconic of all symbols for the ZIP Code was Mr. Zip himself. The original design was done by Harold Wilcox, an ad man from Cunningham and Walsh. The original cartoon advertised a bank-by-mail campaign for the Chase Manhattan Bank. The design was later acquired by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), who then offered it to the Post Office Department. Mr. Zip was finally retired by the U.S. Postal Service in 1983, such a ubiquitous face of American postal history that it is difficult to think of him as retired.

Unlike telephone area codes that stay with our cell phones as we move from city to city, ZIP Codes mark permanent locations. For that reason, they have come a long way from helping to move mail a little faster in the mid-1960s – and have become the crux of numerous statistical, geographical, and socio-political analyses. So the next time you are asked for your ZIP code, think of how those simple little five digits have given way from speeding your mail to providing an identification system to businesses and organizations around the world. Perhaps a little Orwellian after all.